Better graphics handling

Microsoft's Paint is a simple raster graphics application that can be used for a variety of purposes, including viewing photos and making your own paintings. Improving on it is simply a matter of choosing a more specialised application that does what you want to do. Pop over to www.tudogs.com and click on Graphics to see just how many free graphics applications there are.

If you want to edit photos and make paintings, you could go all the way and choose the free Open Source application called GIMP (Graphics Image Manipulation Program from www.wingimp.org). Originally released for Linux, it has been successfully ported to Windows and offers similar capability to commercial programs like Adobe PhotoShop and Jasc Paintshop Pro.

Or you could try ImageForge. ImageForge is a complete painting program for creating or editing images, retouching photos, making .avi animations, assembling slide shows or picture albums, and more. You can produce outstanding results from your own pictures and photos. A partial listing of ImageForge features includes the following:

• Preview window, with zoom and other controls allow you to edit with pixel-level precision;

• Soft and patterned brushes;

• Clipart brushes for painting with a series of images;

• Scatter and Spatter tools;

• Special Effect Filters;

• Clone tool for reproducing areas of an image for retouching, etc. You can even clone between two open images;

• Support for pressure-sensitive stylus and tablet devices;

• TWAIN device support for scanners, cameras, etc.;

• Semi-transparent "Intensity" control for painting, text and pasted items;

• Normal, Fill-to-Border, and Color-replacement flood fills. Options to use patterns, gradients, and semi-transparent fills;

• Gradients and Patterns;

• Crop, Enlarge, Resize, high quality Resample, Skew, Rotate by Degree;

• AVI and BMP filmstrip animations;

• Tools to produce and distribute you own stand-alone .exe image Libraries, complete with viewer utility, editor, transitions between images, install program, etc. Use to create family albums, portfolios of your work, screensavers, slide show presentations, and more;

• Printing options allow you to add header and footer text, change image DPI, etc.;

• Support for many image formats, including .JPG with adjustable quality and compression;

• and many more powerful features...

Not bad for a free program. Available from http://www.cursorarts.com/ca_imffw.html.

Another you could check out is Pixia from http://park18.wakwak.com/~pixia.

If you just want a good graphics viewer, try IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) or XnView (http://www.xnview.com), or watch the magazine discs for a copy of ACDSee 4.0, which they are currently giving away.